"Listen to me now: There has never been a military in the entire history of the human race that has gone to war equipped with more than the least that it needs to fight the enemy. War is expensive. It costs money and it costs lives and no civilization has an infinite amount of either. So when you fight, you conserve. You use and equip only as much as you have to, never more.

He stared at us grimly. "Is any of this getting through? Do any of you understand what I'm trying to tell you? You don't have these shiny new bodies and pretty new weapons because we want to give you an unfair advantage. You have these bodies and these weapons because they are the absoluteminimum that will allow you to fight and survive out there. We didn't want to give you these bodies, you dipsh*ts. It's just that if we didn't, the human race would already be extinct.

"Do you understand now? Do you finally have an idea of what you're up against? Do you?"

Scalzi's online persona is a a bit of a dipsh*t. Produces readable, but not great, fiction.

He is, come to think of it, the Robert E. Lee of SF writers in a world of Lost Cause a**holes.